On April 10, 1869, Congress passed legislation increasing the number of Supreme Court justices from seven to nine, where it’s remained since. At the Court The Supreme Court on Thursday denied Sam Ronan’s request to block Ohio election officials from removing him from the state’s Republican primary election ballot. Read […]

During oral argument in January on an Idaho law barring transgender athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s sports, Justice Sonia Sotomayor briefly reflected on the spotlight that comes with being involved in a Supreme Court case, noting that having your name on a brief draws attention to you not […]

Clear Statements is a recurring series by Abbe R. Gluck on civil litigation and the modern regulatory and statutory state. Rumors of the textualist triumph over legislative history have been greatly exaggerated. A debate has raged among lawyers and judges for decades about the changes the Supreme Court’s textualists have wrought […]

Curious about how Supreme Court justices spend their spare time? Justice Sonia Sotomayor revealed on Tuesday that she likes reading … recent books from her colleagues. She “said she just finished reading Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s memoir and is in the middle of reading former Justice Anthony Kennedy’s.” At the […]

Courtly Observations is a recurring series by Erwin Chemerinsky that focuses on what the Supreme Court’s decisions will mean for the law, for lawyers and lower courts, and for people’s lives. The Supreme Court’s decision in Chiles v. Salazar, essentially declaring unconstitutional the Colorado law prohibiting talk therapy to attempt to […]

Lawyers for Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, as well as county election officials, urged the Supreme Court on Wednesday to let them go ahead with a ballot that does not include Sam Ronan, a candidate for Ohio’s 15th congressional district, for the state’s Republican primary on May 5. Ohio […]

In early January, as the country eagerly awaited a tariffs ruling that – as it turned out – was still more than a month away, Supreme Court watchers raised concerns about the court’s pace. They questioned whether the justices had fallen behind on writing opinions in the 27 cases they […]

Civil Rights and Wrongs is a recurring series by Daniel Harawa covering criminal justice and civil rights cases before the court. I have written before about the Supreme Court’s troubling habit of summarily closing the courthouse doors on those with the least power in our legal system. Just last month, […]

Yesterday marked four years since Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed to the Supreme Court, paving the way for her to become the first Black woman to serve as a justice. At the Court In a new request for interim relief, the court has been asked to bar Ohio Secretary […]

While I have written multiple posts for SCOTUSblog on birthright citizenship, a substantial part of my practice is litigating Second Amendment claims. In light of that experience, I was struck when listening to the Trump v. Barbara argument that the challengers’ counsel Cecillia Wang repeatedly insisted that the exceptions to […]